Reworking APR for Printing

 aircraft, APR, blather, books, drawings, history, new products, projects, rockets, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Aug 112012
 

A decade ago I wrote a bunch of issues of APR, and mailed them out as photocopies. Half a decade ago, I started completely reworking those issues to be released digitally, first on CD-ROM and then as downloads. Then a year or so ago I started making the newest re-worked issues compatible with MagCloud so that customers could purchase printed copies. But all of Volume 1 and most of Volume 2 have not been made available on MagCloud – they just weren’t formatted properly. Wrong margins and, worse, some random 11X17 pages.

When I finished with Packfile #2, German Rocketplanes, I started reworking the reworked editions of Volume 1 for MagCloud. It’s slower going than I’d like… Microsoft Word 1997 is a fine program, but one thing it kinda goes bonkers at is a large document where the fonts and margins are globally changed. Everything gets scattered hither and yon for reasons that are obscure to me. However, I’ve got the first 3 issues more or less hammered into shape. They question is: how much more hammering?

Spelling and grammar errors I fix when I see ’em. Factual errors are changed (such as V1N3, where I repeatedly and inexplicably refer to the clearly labeled Bell “SeaKat” as the “SkyKat” and sometimes “SkyCat”). But with some of the articles, new information has come my way since the original publication. Additional drawings or other imagery; improved quality versions of what I originally had. The CAD drawings I made starting in V1N2 can be improved and reformatted; a number of designs from V1N1 could have CAD drawings made of them. But should I go to the bother? Would reworking some of these things *again* be worth my time and your money?

I guess that’s the question. I don’t expect to sell but maybe a handful of MagCloudified copies of APR issues. In all the years I’ve been including my own CAD layout drawings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a single message that said either “they add usefully to the description” or “those are a waste of space.” So: if you were on the fence about getting a MagCloud printed copy of, say V1N3, would the inclusion of a few new bits of vintage imagery push you over? Would new or revised CAD drawings do anything for you?

You know engineers, they love to change things. So I’m tempted to try to make these doubly-revised articles as complete as I can with new stuff. But that might be time and effort better spent on some other, more productive task.

Speak your piece.

 Posted by at 12:37 am

“The Hobbit” will be a trilogy

 awesomeness, blather, books  2 Responses »
Jul 302012
 

When “The Hobbit” was originally announce as two movies, I thought that was stretching things a lot. It’s just not that big of a book. But it got stretched out by filling in a lot of details that weren’t in “The Hobbit” the book by including stuff from the appendices of “The Lord of the Rings,” which gives information on what some characters were doing during “The Hobbit,” such as Gandalf off with his wizard brothers fighting Sauron. Well, I guess the team behind the two Hobbit movies decided there was enough material for *three* movies.

‘Hobbit’ trilogy confirmed by Peter Jackson, Internet rejoices

 Posted by at 11:01 pm

“2001: The Lost Science”

 awesomeness, books, science fiction  8 Responses »
Jun 272012
 

If you’re anything like me (and who wouldn’t want to be?), you have been frustrated by the dearth of hard info about the spacecraft and technologies shown in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” With a few exceptions, most of the stuff that has been published over the years has been either rehashed PR images, screenshots or outright guesswork. Piers Bizony’s “2001 Filming the Future,” published in 1994, has been just about the only good source for concept art, diagrams and other such imagery, but it remained pretty lean.

Since I started work on the Space Station V diagrams (described HERE), I’ve been interested in finding anything new on the subject. Of course after more than four decades, it’s hardly to be expected that much is left to find. One potential source is the recently published “2001: The Lost Science” by Adam Johnson, published by Apogee Prime. I bought it a few weeks back in the *hope* that there might be some good and/or useful stuff in it; hope was pretty much all I had as there were few reviews or descriptions out there. It showed up in the mail a few days ago… thanks, mailperson, for leaving it in the dirt at the side of the road. Feh.

Anyway: I’ve purchased a number of Apogee space books in the past, and they’ve all been fairly small-format paperbacks. Imagine my surprise to find that “2001: TLS” is the size of an old issue of Life magazine; finding a place for it on the bookshelves might be a bit of an issue. And it’s just as well that it is this large… it is loaded to the gills with high-quality imagery, including a lot of cleaned-up blueprints. Some of the “holy grail” blueprints remain lost… no overall views of the Discovery, none of the Space Station V. But there are essentially complete “deck plans” of the Discovery, including pod bay and centrifuge; cockpits of the Orion/Aries; Aries passenger deck plan and elevation; control panels; space pod, and others.

For me, the best/most annoying inclusion was, at long last, good diagrams of the Orion III spaceplane. This is not quite the Orion as it appeared in the movie… a few details are off, including antennae and a slightly different cockpit canopy configuration, but on the whole it lays the vehicle out nicely. Where it becomes annoying: Oh, Now You Tell Me. It gives full scale dimensions: 175 feet long (not counting the “spines”), and 85 feet span. This is notably smaller than the dimensions I’ve been using.

A decade ago, when I first started hacking away at the idea of a “2001 Tech Manual,” I tried to determine the sizes of the vehicles. For the Orion III, I started off assuming that the reported scale of 1/144 for the old Aurora plastic model kit of the Orion III was accurate. This produced a length of 165 feet, a span of 85. Not too far off, especially given how little interest model kit companies have often shown in sci-fi kit accuracy. After that, I read through Ian Walsh’s study of the Orion III, and how he came up with dimensions, and found his reasoning convincing. His dimensions are 213 feet length, 109 feet span. Much larger than what is apparently the “official” size of the craft. This would have implications for those who have the Fantastic Plastic model of the Space Station V; but at this point I’m just going to stick my fingers in my ears and hum real loud when anyone asks about that.

“2001: The Lost Science” is a bit pricey, at about $50. But I believe it is worth it. You can buy it from Apogee’s online bookstore (but not, sadly, from Amazon.com).

It is packed with illustrations. I am currently busy scanning a number of them, in particular diagrams, to help out with a few projects. But I won’t post them… here’s a case where if you want ’em, you should really go through the proper channels for ’em.

Recommended.

UPDATE:

Adam Johnson, the books author, contacted me and answered a few questions:

1: Apogee is also selling the book on eBay (same price). This may be an easier purchasing option for some people. Look HERE.

2: More is coming out in a year or so. Details on exactly what, and in exactly what format, are currently under wraps.

 Posted by at 6:20 pm

“Fifty Shades of Grey”

 awesomeness, blather, books, humor, youtube  1 Response »
Jun 272012
 

I haven’t read it, nor do I plan to. Doesn’t really seem like it’d be my thing (I haven’t heard whether Cthulhu or nuclear pulse propulsion makes an appearance). However… from the sounds of it, the Gilbert Gottfried audio book version might be worth getting…

NSFW? Oh, yes, indeed!

[youtube 5K1RcKJVbHA]

 Posted by at 9:32 am

Another day or two…

 blather, books, drawings, new products, science fiction  3 Responses »
Jun 022012
 

… and I’ll close off “investment” on this little project:

Kickstarter: Computer/2001:SSV

I have reached the goal (woo!), though I haven’t blown past it far enough to retire upon (boo!). The products to be produced will be produced in extremely limited quantities and won’t be otherwise commercially available , so if detailed diagrams and technical description of the Space Station V floats your boat, here’s your shot.

UPDATE: The project was successful in obtaining a sufficiency of pledges; it is now closed to new pledges.

 Posted by at 1:49 am

Stagger Around #1: F-104A Starfighter

 aircraft, books, new products, photography  3 Responses »
Mar 172012
 

I put together a number of photos I recently took of Hill Aerospace Museums newly-restored F-104A into a free downloadable PDF booklet.

If you like this, feel free to distribute hither and yon. If you *really* like this, feel free to toss a dollar or three my way.

If there is interest, I will make more of this sort of thing… I have a vast collection of photos of aerospace and weapons systems that might be of interest.

 Posted by at 12:50 pm

We Need To Dream Big Again

 blather, books, history, reshaping the world, science, science fiction, spacecraft  11 Responses »
Mar 162012
 

The April 2012 issue of Popular Mechanics has an article/editorial by Glenn Harlan Reynolds that is *disturbingly* familiar. I was flipping through the issue today while waiting for the Wal-Mart pharmacy to do their thing when I came across an article illustrated as if it were a mid-1950’s sci-fi “juvenile,” and starts off with the line:

THE FUTURE ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE.

SCIENCE FICTION USED TO BE ABOUT BOLD ENGINEERING. SO WAS AMERICA.

Mr. Reynolds makes much the same points I’ve been trying to make, and hopefully he’s done it better. The thrust of the article is that the pace of meaningful technological progress has slowed at the same time that science fiction has become far less inspiring. Some damned good points:

“We can’t Facebook our way out of the current economic status quo”

“There was some moment in the late ’60s and ’70s when people thought we had enough tech”

we’ve lost “speed of implementation”  – “you can roll out a new social media platform or an iPhone app in a hurry, but do Twitter and Angry Birds improve lives the way rural electrification did?”

“We’ve given people new ways to communicate but nothing worth saying.”

“Facebook probably won’t save us from economic stagnation; it certainly won’t save us from an asteroid.”

“The golden age approach is just more inspiring.”

——–

It may be a chicken-and-egg thing – which came first, the end of inspiring sci-fi, or the end of inspiring reality. But the fact remains they are both currently largely absent. Go into a the kids section of a book store and *try* to find some science fiction. You’ll find instead a boatload of fantasy: wizards and vampires and werewolves and whatnot. Entertaining, no doubt, but nothing that can be achieved, nothing to strive for… and nothing to truly inspire. There are no Big Projects in aerospace these days, and little to no modern science fiction that would inspire kids. So, with nothing to inspire kids into aerospace, why would the go into aerospace? There are buckets of fortunes to be made in social media and software; almost nobody gets rich off of aerospace – and some of us get dirt poor off of aerospace. So with a culture as basically shallow as our, it is not surprising that those who might have educated themselves so that they could conquer the spacelanes now educate themselves to create the next Twitter.

Mr. Reynolds encountered a whole lot of pessimism in interviewing people – Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge – for his article, but maintained a level of optimism. A list of “bold and optimistic” science fiction, from Golden Age to today, is included. A few things it seems I may need to look up.

 Posted by at 8:15 pm

NPP Progress

 books, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, science fiction, spacecraft  9 Responses »
Mar 152012
 

Current status of the Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book by way of pagecount:

There will be some substantial changes in those numbers… some will get tightened up by way of cleaning up some messy formatting and by reducing needlessly large images, other will get greatly expanded (pop culture, for  example, is currently little more than placeholders).

 Posted by at 11:32 pm
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